BEGINNINGS
This issue appears on the second anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, and opens with three articles which relate to the occasion. The first article is by Israel's new Ambassador to the United...
...It is far too soon to tell whether the new "interim settlement" arranged by Dr...
...The issue is whether the space called Israel can become certain enough so that Israel can get on to the creation of a today...
...I rather doubt the hypothesis, but the phenomenon it seeks to explain is surely real...
...From his review we learned that one chapter had been omitted from the English edition, a chapter entitled "And Yeshurun Waxed Fat," a reference to the galloping materialism of Israeli society between 1967 and 1973...
...Instead, they seized hold of a large dream and willed it, and wrenched it, alive...
...Kissinger is a cause for celebration, but the issue cannot be (as some rather noisy Israelis evidently suppose) whether this piece of land or that belongs to one side or the other...
...Our wholly understandable preoccupation with space is a temporary phase whose successful conclusion will permit us to re-enter time in all its parts...
...A few days later he sent the chapter along, and, in a somewhat revised version, it opens this issue...
...Ambassador Herzog describes Israel before the Yom Kippur War, and his subject is a whole society and its leaders...
...Thereby, he implicitly raises an interesting question: How does one deal with the difference between Jews as a collective, with all the symbolic baggage of the term, and the individual Jews one encounters...
...But if it is now, it must also be here, and that, of course, means space...
...The omission seemed to us calculated, since the chapter was almost surely critical, and we urgently asked our contributing editor in Israel to send us a copy of the original Hebrew version...
...Words come alive in so many different ways...
...somehow, the present gets lost...
...I worry about that sometimes, because the time we seem to sanctify is almost always past time {hayamim hahem) or future time {acharit hayamim...
...And Datan's memoir is followed by a major contribution to the discussion of Israel's future by Nadav Safran...
...Instead, we seek merely to make it through another day...
...There is real danger in that: Would Israel have been reborn had its founders seen the future only one day at a time...
...Some months back, we learned that then-General Herzog had written a book on the War, and that it would appear in an English translation...
...Some people suggest that it is our exclusion from the present that has led to Jewish prominence in the world of letters...
...A couple of weeks back, there was Ambassador Herzog on the New York-Boston shuttle, as were we, and we told him of our interest...
...Gene Lyons, in "The Artificial Jewboy," describes its effects from the special perspective of a young Catholic who wants to make it as an author - and who feels, therefore, that he must somehow come to grips with Jews...
...Heschel taught us that Jews sanctify time, not space...
...That's a lot for each frail and individual Jew to carry around, and sorting the collective imagery from the individual reality is, as Lyons shows, a continuing problem for non-Jews as well...
...Among the many reasons we are happy to print it is this: While debate within Israel is intense, often reaching depths of vituperation that would be thought out of bounds in the United States, the American Jewish community has, for the most part, been utterly insulated from even mildly critical assessments of Israel...
...Israel, however, is the Jewish effort to lay claim to the present, to create a time that is now...
...We live suspended between ancient memory and distant hope...
...Space not for its own sake, but for the sake of a time that has balance, that permits immediacy...
...Jews are a dominant force in contemporary American literature, and, whatever the explanation, the fact is one of consequence...
...Accustomed to disappointment, we are afraid of hope...
...We asked General Aharon Yariv to review the book for us, a review which appears in this issue...
...F...
...We are the People of the Book, we are survivors, we are stiff-necked, we are The Jews...
...The mail is slow, but coincidence is quick...
...Since we believe that a community depends on candor, it may be instructive to read such very candid criticism by a ranking official of Israel's government...
...Safran's carefully reasoned proposal for a Middle East peace describes a wholly unfamiliar world, not only because its accents are those of diplomacy rather than of personal experience, but also because many of us have become so habituated to endless war that we simply cannot take the prospect of peace very seriously...
...Nancy Datan, who recalls the days of the War itself, speaks of one lonely person, yet her poet's pen is as telling as Herzog's historian's brush...
...Unable to act, we have observed, and have told what we have seen...
...The first article is by Israel's new Ambassador to the United Nations, Chaim Herzog, and there is a wee tale to be told about it...
Vol. 1 • October 1975 • No. 4
